Voting Rights At Risk in Georgia

Voting Rights At Risk in Georgia

After the Supreme Court's controversial decision, civil rights advocates say voting in the state is under attack

Local authorities throughoutGeorgia are changing votingrules in the wake of a recent Supreme Court ruling.VANO SHLAMOV/AFP/GettyImages

In June, the Supreme Court's Shelby v. Holder decision
disarmed Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, freeing nine states –
mostly in the South – from having to submit election procedure changes
for the Justice Department's approval. The vast majority of voting laws
that the department objected to as discriminatory came from towns and
counties, rather than the state level. Since the ruling, such localities
have seen both quiet changes to election code and also deep
uncertainties among civil rights advocates who long relied on this key
provision of the Voting Rights Act.
The state of Georgia alone offers many examples. The city of Athens,
for instance, is considering a proposal to eliminate nearly half of its
24 polling sites in favor of creating two early voting centers – both
located inside police stations. Madelyn Clare Powell, a longtime civil
rights activist in Athens, worries that some voters cannot regard police
stations as neutral territory. "There is a major intimidation factor
here – these police stations are seen by some in the community as
hostile territory," says Powell, citing historical tension between white
police forces and minority communities in the region. Local activists
also fear that the poll closures disproportionally impact neighborhoods
with higher shares of minorities and college students, requiring
three-hour bus rides for some public-transit dependent voters.See the Five Most Outrageous Facts About Our Broken Voting System
"With the popularity of advance voting, election day lines have
subsided and we can serve voters with fewer election day polling
places," saysGail Schrader, Athens' Supervisor of Elections
and Voter Registration. Schrader also notes that police stations are
among the few spaces that could accommodate early voting sites for weeks
at a time, and that the proposal could annually save taxpayers tens of
thousands of dollars.
Several miles from Athens, heavily rural Greene County implemented a redistricting plan directly following the Shelby ruling. The
Justice Department, which blocked another redistricting plan in the
same county just last year, had been reviewing the new plan before the
Supreme Court ruling, and the ACLU had strongly denounced the plan as
discriminatory. In August, the new districts stirred a small demonstration in the town of Greensboro.
Adjacent to Greene County is Morgan County, which in July considered a
proposal to eliminate over half of its polling sites. City Councilman
Michael Naples believed the plan could disenfranchise low-income,
minority voters who lack access to automobiles. "Although [Section 5]
preclearance is no longer a requisite, you gentlemen and ladies are
still required to have a clear conscience relative to any decisions you
make relative to voting," Naples told the Board of Elections in a July
meeting. The county ultimately voted to eliminate just over a third of
polling sites.
Outside Atlanta, in the suburban community of Druid Hills, Henry
Carey – a political science professor at Georgia State University, who
has worked observing elections in Haiti, El Salvador, Nicaragua and
elsewhere – voted in a special charter school election in August. He was
appalled at what he saw: The poll workers were overtly partisan,
wearing t-shirts supporting the charter effort up for vote. The polling
site was open for only four hours and was in a heavily white
neighborhood, although the school district is majority black. "Nowhere
on earth have I ever seen such an utterly illegal election," says Carey.
Last month, the NAACP implored Baker County, located in Georgia's
southwest corner, to explain the rationale behind a proposal to
eliminate four out of five of its polling places. The civil rights group
argued the move could hinder voting access across the county –
especially for poorer residents who are disproportionately black. Baker
County responded with a brief letter simply stating that the plan was
still under consideration.
Just days after the Shelby decision, a newspaper in the town of Augusta reported
that local officials are considering reintroducing a plan – struck down
as discriminatory by federal authorities last year – to shift the
city's elections from November to the summertime, when the city's black
turnout is typically lower. In 2012, the Justice Department asserted
that state officials had not provided a convincing explanation for the
date change beyond voter suppression.
Augusta has a long, fraught history with voting. "It's is one of
these cities that has continually come up with new strategies to
suppress turnout," says Leah Aden, an attorney with the NAACP Legal
Defense Fund, which is scrambling to establish a network to discover and
challenge problematic voting proposals in the Justice Department's
absence. Although the Supreme Court argued that the formula determining
Section 5's jurisdiction was outdated, Aden contends that the provision
still broadly targeted regions with uniquely recurrent voting issues,
enabling authorities to swat down discriminatory proposals before they
became law (and thus far harder to challenge).
"It's very hard to keep up with this through case-by-case litigation," says Aden. "But we're going to try."